Thursday, May 7, 2015

Drawing & Illustration for Dummies

Continuing with my spate of recent online classes, I recently finished watching Heather Ross' Drawing & Illustration Basics on Creative Bug. In the next week or so I'm going to be posting a REALLY BIG round-up of all the online classes I've taken, but I wanted to share some of my attempts from Heather's class in particular.

Heather really focuses on drawing everyday objects so we started out with some little things little clothespins and push pins.

Next we moved on to some more complex sketches of things like flowers.

Up to this point in the class, I basically was just drawing whatever she drew, but then I diverted and started sketching some things from our backyard (I mean, it IS spring and EVERYTHING is blooming!)

In the second part of the class she focused on filling in the sketches with gouache, which is a type of opaque watercolor paint that is hard to spell. I was immediately very intimidated, because the bulk of my forays in to painting are decidedly abstract, but I soldiered on at her encouragement that "everyone can draw/paint."

SO I gave it my best effort and was mildly impressed/happy with the result! Lots of room or improvement though.

Finally, she talked a lot about making conversational artwork... again, not something I do naturally... but I loved the little painting she taught us to do of a ladybug hiding under a mushroom. Check out #cbugsketchbook on Instagram to see like 15 of my classmates versions of this... pretty freaking adorable in my opinion.

I think this class was really interesting and pushed me to attempt drawing more things that I usually immediately am like... "nope... can't draw flowers, sorry."

Unrelated to what was taught in the class, I also decided to try my hand at some brush lettering which I really loved and hope to do more of in the future. Sort of an easier (for me) way to get a calligraphic style without the frustration of bending metal nibs (curse my heavy hands!).

Stay tuned for another post coming up in which I will share my deep thoughts and general fangirl-ness from a bunch of the online classes I've taken. If you've been thinking about learning some new stuff... this post will be for you!